scottymac
New Born Pup
Hiya,
We have 5 piggies, 2x 3 year old sows that we adopted 5 months ago, 2 X 7 month old sows and a 2 1/2 year old neutered boar. Having had some initial bonding issues, we managed to get them all together about 4 months ago and everything had been reasonably calm until a few weeks ago.
All of a sudden we caught the oldest sow started barbering the boar and then over the next few days she started barbering the others. We put it down to boredom and tried to make life more interesting by hiding food, adding toys, adding cardboard boxes to chew on, hay cookies etc but noticed she was still doing it, mostly to the male.
We then went away for a week and picked them up today and she seems to have got much worse, if she's not eating she's barbering. The strange thing is that 3 of them seem to like it, they sit there calmly and apparently let her do it. The big issue is that she keeps doing it to our smallest and youngest sow while she's asleep under her blanket, causing her to scream wildly. When we first heard the screaming we thought there was something badly wrong until we looked and caught Millie barbering her. Several times today we've looked over and she's moving from one to another, barbering away, then there's mad screams and she's barbering Maria. Even worse, both of the other girls have taken to barbering Maria while she's asleep, leading to more screaming! To be fair, they all now have really bad haircuts but no bald spots or obvious skin damage but it's really upsetting Maria. She's still happily eating and doing crazy zoomies several times a day but the screaming proves she's really bothered by it .
Is there much we can do other than splitting them, which we'd really rather avoid? They are currently in a 10x2cage and I don't know if more space would help?
Any advice at this point would greatly received.
Many thanks
Scott
We have 5 piggies, 2x 3 year old sows that we adopted 5 months ago, 2 X 7 month old sows and a 2 1/2 year old neutered boar. Having had some initial bonding issues, we managed to get them all together about 4 months ago and everything had been reasonably calm until a few weeks ago.
All of a sudden we caught the oldest sow started barbering the boar and then over the next few days she started barbering the others. We put it down to boredom and tried to make life more interesting by hiding food, adding toys, adding cardboard boxes to chew on, hay cookies etc but noticed she was still doing it, mostly to the male.
We then went away for a week and picked them up today and she seems to have got much worse, if she's not eating she's barbering. The strange thing is that 3 of them seem to like it, they sit there calmly and apparently let her do it. The big issue is that she keeps doing it to our smallest and youngest sow while she's asleep under her blanket, causing her to scream wildly. When we first heard the screaming we thought there was something badly wrong until we looked and caught Millie barbering her. Several times today we've looked over and she's moving from one to another, barbering away, then there's mad screams and she's barbering Maria. Even worse, both of the other girls have taken to barbering Maria while she's asleep, leading to more screaming! To be fair, they all now have really bad haircuts but no bald spots or obvious skin damage but it's really upsetting Maria. She's still happily eating and doing crazy zoomies several times a day but the screaming proves she's really bothered by it .
Is there much we can do other than splitting them, which we'd really rather avoid? They are currently in a 10x2cage and I don't know if more space would help?
Any advice at this point would greatly received.
Many thanks
Scott
